by wildbow
He could feel the hesitation from the things that had been his lieutenants and friends just days ago as if it was a tangible thing. He was trying hard not to look at anything in particular, because it only made it worse when he focused on something and instinctively demolished the meaning of that thing, to make that thing easier to destroy in the coming future.
“Sure,” The festering thing that had been Junior said. “Unless someone else wants to object or argue the point, I know some other students I can ask, we’ll wrangle something.”
Sylvester thought of saying goodbye to Lillian, both times. He thought of how she had cried.
The lump in his throat wasn’t going away. The anger—it felt muted, but only because it was being redirected, painting everything in sight, twisting it.
He thought of shooting Mary, because there had been no good way to keep her from pursuing him.
Sylvester spoke as the idea was formulated and provided by the ones who stood nearby. Cynthia, the Sub Rosa. An unusual pairing. “Bring some food and supplies, plan to be there for a short while. I think there’s running water in there.”
“Food and supplies?” The Junior-thing asked. Then, likely in response to some signal, he switched stances, “Sure. Can do.”
“Alright,” The Davis-thing said. “Ominous. Do the rest of us need to take measures?”
“They run,” Cynthia said. Burned though she was, she was more person than the things that populated the crowd.
“The rest? They run,” Sylvester said, meeting Cynthia’s eyes.
“Sylvester—” one of the things reached out, touching Sylvester’s arm.
Sylvester lashed out, slapping it away, taking a step back and away.
He stood there, arm extended, blade in hand, watching the individual’s hand bleed, and he eyed the crowd.
“Alright,” the thing that had been Davis said, clutching its wrist. “Junior’s got that handled. What else do you need?”
“He’ll need to barricade the lab.”
“Sure thing.”
“And we run. Alright. Can you explain why, or—or just tell me why you were so dead set on taking control over the Academy and now it looks like you’re dismantling that?”
“You control sixty percent of the rebels, perhaps, sixty percent that are angry enough to listen to you,” Mauer said. “You have enough sway to control the rest of the rebels, and by extension, you can keep your enemies pinned down in the dormitories. But you don’t truly control this Academy.”
“No explanation needed, because I’m not giving up that control,” Sylvester said. “I’m cementing it.”
“If Sylvester says to run,” the Shirley-thing said, “Then I think we should all go. To rooms, or to labs where you can do work. Grab food on the way, barricade.”
Sylvester nodded. “I’d hurry.”
Some hurried. Others paused. Half of the shapes and figures that remained were hesitant, wondering if they could hurt him. The other half, maybe a third, were the truly loyal. Paul and Red would be among them. They were waiting because they weren’t sure if they needed to protect him.
“I’ll walk away if you do,” a thing with a bird’s skull for a head said. Something indistinct throbbed behind the eye sockets.
“You guys take the other staircase,” the Davis figure said. “We watch each other through the glass.”
The bird skull nodded. “What should we do with this one?”
Sylvester looked at the shape that knelt beside the bird skulled boy. It bled from a face wound, hugging itself within a corset of its own flesh.
“You’ve killed worse monsters with less hesitation,” Melancholy said.
“I’ll handle it,” Sylvester said.
“If you’re sure,” the bird skull said.
In that, they started to retreat, the Davis-thing’s group matching the other. Only a few lingered. Shirley, Bo Peep. Pierre.
“Would the others want you to take this course of action?”
Sylvester, unable to definitively picture the Lambs’ faces, could only imagine the way Gordon’s voice had broken in that final exchange of words, Hubris’ sigh, the movement of Jamie’s hands as he’d sat on that stone throne with technology threaded through it, the way Lillian had covered her eyes while crying.
So much pain and anger.
“Yes,” he said.
Even with all that his mind was doing to make the people he was looking at less sympathetic, he was very aware of the look of disappointment on Shirley’s face.
She left, and Sylvester remained where he was.
He was left alone in the broader Lab One area, waiting, aware of the fact that he wasn’t even positive of his environment anymore. Stepping into that elaborate office in Radham had been the crossing of a line that made the rest of it so easy to lose.
Junior’s group came back down the stairs, still escorting a bound and gagged Ferres. They had crates of food.
“Wish us luck,” the thing that had been Junior said.
Sylvester didn’t trust himself to speak.
He waited, listening, as the doors to the surgery theater were shut, locked, and furniture scraped against the ground.
He walked, and he walked with only the company of his enemies, his regrets, and his disembodied thoughts.
Anger, in early childhood, could so easily be conveyed with a punch to a pillow. A sharper, less sensible anger could lead to punching a wall, breaking something. Despair, pain, loneliness, they warranted tears. More severe despair warranted wails. Screams.
More severe action, like the notion that he could have intervened with the expiration of two of his brothers? There was no physical dimension for that kind of expression.
He wasn’t sure the version of events or the train of logic was correct. He wasn’t sure how Lillian had been convinced, when she had access to their records. He could assign some blame to the fact that a clever architect and the fact that Lillian had been raised with this broader expectation, and the fact that so many experiments were also set up to destroy themselves sooner than later, to protect the Academy’s control over things.
But he knew and believed that Ferres had started acting like she had something she could use around the time the topic of expirations and the looming deadlines had come up.
She likely thought he would cave, that she could bargain, make a promise to postpone or avert this calculated extinction of Lambkind. Very possibly a lie or a half truth.
He doubted it had really been him that had done that damage to her, on his recognition of that blatant attempt at manipulation.
It would be him that acted on this instance of learning Ferres’ truth.
“Come,” he spoke, grabbing the back of a neck that belonged to the thing with the bleeding face. It made high pitched sounds as it stumbled, trying to keep up with him.
Lab One was an expansive area, with its open space, tables, cabinets, and space for the larger experiments. Some of those experiments were more visible now that the crowd had left. They watched the proceedings with lazy, drugged expressions.
There were five ways out of Lab One. Two sets of stairs, one on each side, a north door to the surgical area, and then two paths that folded around, leading to places onlookers couldn’t readily see.
One of those places was where this thing with the bleeding face had come from. The Betty-thing. The rows of cells that had once held fairy tales.
The other was where the beasts were.
“The Big Bad Wolf,” Sylvester said. “It hunts Red. Why?”
“What? Please. Don’t hurt me.”
“Cooperate and I won’t. Tell me how they work. Pheromones?”
“Keywords, for most.”
“Like Mary,” Percy said. “Hopefully these keywords work better.”
Sylvester spoke, his voice low, “There were storylines. Ones for if the birthday boy wanted adventure, one for if they wanted slaughter. It wasn’t ruled out that they might want to set the wolf on the innocent. On other experiment
s.”
“Please—” Betty said.
“Was it?”
“It’s in the books,” was her reluctant answer.
Sylvester shoved the Betty-thing toward the collected volumes. “Find it. Cooperate and you live through this.”
Glass windows blinked. Branches that encased them throbbed. The Lady of Hackthorn was very much alive. She might even have felt the anticipation and barely restrained emotion that Sylvester himself felt.
“Here.”
The book had been opened to the right page.
“Like uttering a spell, isn’t it?” the Snake Charmer asked.
Sylvester held the book, looking at the wolf. “How dark it is, inside the wolf.”
The wolf turned its attention to him. Whatever haze of drugs had gripped it fell away in moments.
“Raise your muzzle, blackest of wolves, howl, and we shall howl with you. Hunt, and we shall hunt with you. Bloody those claws and fill that belly, and we shall draw blood and feast alongside you. All…”
Sylvester touched the great black wolf’s snout, moving it to ensure the Wolf had a good look at all of the other experiments present.
“…who you see, all bear the pelts of wolves. The rest are yours to take.”
In an instant, the great black wolf moved, leaving the stable area, claws scratching floor.
“How dark it is, inside the wolf,” Sylvester said to himself. He tore out a page and stuck it into a pocket.
“Do you realize what you just did? It’s going to kill everything it can find,” Betty said.
Rather than ask her to point out the words, knowing what he was looking for.
Sub Rosa stood by and watched as he found the entry for the nightmare.
This would only be the beginning. Below were smaller labs. Ones with weapons meant to be more practical.
☙
“A king of your own court,” the Baron said. “The subjects cowed with fear.”
Sylvester sat at the highest point he could that also gave him a view of the rest of the Academy. It was a point he had found earlier, at the stairs that overlooked the dining area, the bridges to the various buildings, and the dormitories.
He was the king of his own court, but it was a lonely one. Here and there, his vassals would appear. The Red Bull, the Black Wolf, the Rat Mother, the Poison Apple, the Hag, the Giant, or a host of scurrying parasites. They would naturally pass through in the course of going from one place to the next.
The thing that had once been Betty sat on a stair below him, her head near his knee. The more time went on, the less she talked.
One bridge burned. The fires were a way to keep things from entering the administration building.
“The lie built the Crown up to be something grand. Some learned the truth, but they twisted the lie so they could keep it close to their hearts. The Duke of Francis was one of them,” the Baron said.
The Rat Mother’s children dragged a morsel across the floor of the dining hall, to a dark place where they could devour it. To Sylvester’s eye it was more monster than the Rat Mother’s children. But by its size, it was a child—a boy. The child extended a hand toward Sylvester. One of the three blind mice, perhaps?
“For others, for us, one way or another, we let the truth destroy what the lie had built. It destroyed something in us. We ended up very similar, you and I, didn’t we?”
The Baron laughed that laugh again. It hadn’t been the first time in the last hour, nor the fifth, nor the tenth.
Sylvester told himself the child the Rat Mother’s children had been dragging was a hallucination. The last few had.
He remained where he was, holding his court hostage, every one of his muscles tense.
The Academy was absolutely under control, now.
☙
“This is too lonely an existence, isn’t it?” Percy asked. “It’s wretched.”
Sylvester sat. Rain drummed against the glass ceiling. It was doing a number on the protective fires. Some of the experiments were out there in the gloom—the muffet spider’s eyes glowed in the dark as it scaled the outside wall of the dormitory, looking for its way in, periodically breaking a window.
“Didn’t you see the books?” Percy asked. “Yes, there were books for the bigger monsters. There were scripts and scenarios, a play waiting for the young master to arrive on his birthday, as central actor and director both. But there were books for the others.”
Sylvester had lost track of time. The overcast sky and storm didn’t help, as they made it so dark that the sun wouldn’t penetrate if it had risen.
It felt like it had been a long time. Ships should have come, but the storm might have been postponing them.
“Key phrases. Drugs. Pheromones. With Ferres being who she is, there’s no way she would allow a circumstance where she would have to say no. No way to allow a reality where she would tell the young master or his family no, we can’t do that.”
Percy walked up stairs and down them, a narrow boy in tidy clothes, hair slicked back.
“The young master being a young boy, the experiments being attractive and of an age with him… some of them with you, too, you know the means exists to… suggest they comply.”
Sylvester flinched.
“She wanted to make him a small god. You’ve stolen that, and now you are that small god, aren’t you? You have those means.”
“I wanted Ferres to suffer for a number of reasons,” Sylvester said. “That was one of them.”
“And he talks,” Percy said. He leaned in close. “The resolve weakens, and I make some headway. Now listen, and I’ll make more.”
Sylvester leaned forward, sitting so his hands were over his ears. It made Betty stir awake with a jolt. She made frightened sounds as she realized where she was, said something that Sylvester didn’t hear because Percy was talking.
Percy’s voice filtered through, as if the fingers weren’t there at all. “You don’t have to be ungentlemanly as you go about it, Sylvester. You’re fond of the little girl with the woolen hair, aren’t you? A friendly face, gentle, and well meaning. We can bring her here, and with a few words or the right syringe, we can make her feel absolutely safe, when she might otherwise feel frightened.”
Sylvester shook his head, leaving the hands where they were.
“She can stroke your back, or sleep with her head in your lap, or she can sing, because they can all sing, and you’ll be able to rest, and you’ll sleep, which you desperately need to do.”
Frantic screams from the direction that the rats had dragged the blind mouse made Sylvester nearly jump from his seat.
Betty hadn’t moved, he realized in the last moment. She was still restless. She flinched at the sight of any of the other experiments, large or small. Keywords protected her from the former. The pheromones Sylvester had dabbed on himself would help for most of the latter, while forcing her to keep close so she benefited from the same chemical triggers and protections. She kept moving her head, looking around, jumping at sounds.
Sylvester was silent. He wanted to touch Betty, to say something, anything to urge her to relax, because her anxiety so easily communicated to him.
“Is she supposed to help you?” Percy asked. “If we’re going to get you moving and resolving things, then we’ll have to start with her, then.”
☙
Sylvester sat draped across steps, the stone and wood digging into his back in places. He avoided looking at the fire that consumed one of the dormitories, shut his ears to the distant shouts.
Cynthia sat nearby, a knife whittling away at a piece of wood, not to create anything, but to reduce it to nothing.
Betty lay on the steps below, her limbs bent at odd angles, her face distorted by the way the weight of her body pushed it down into tile. She bled from a throat wound.
Sylvester avoided looking at that too.
Mounting anxiety and self-doubt warred within him, at stark odds to the view he had of the clouds overhead, moon peeking through them.
The rain had slowed, becoming a mere drizzle, and the raindrops were like stars against the void, each one of them catching the light from the burning dormitory.
A lot of the time, the things he saw were relatively fleeting. People came and went. Images came and went.
But Betty remained dead. The fires slowly crept over the dormitory building, and anyone who tried to take action to put them out was picked off by warbeasts and things that hunted.
In this, Cynthia was patient. She would outlast him, because she was his ugly desire to survive, to dig past the pain and crawl forward on wounded limbs, and that would endure long after his mind did.
It would endure, at this rate, well beyond the Beattle and Hackthorn rebels.
☙
“Sylvester,” Jessie said.
Sylvester flinched.
He didn’t want to look up.
“Sy.”
He didn’t want to respond.
“We’re back to this, huh? Like it was in Tynewear, after I caught up to you?”
He swallowed hard.
“I’m sorry I had to come back alone. They did too much damage. Mary and Lillian had to stay back. Duncan didn’t want to come if the others weren’t coming. We might see him later—he couldn’t stay at the Academy with the threat the Infante posed. Helen went after Mauer and didn’t come back.”
Sylvester gripped the edge of the stair with his hands, eyes fixed on the ground.
“But I came back. I will always come back, okay?”
Jessie advanced another few steps, the sound of shoe scuffs loud in the empty dining hall.
“And what we were doing, we can give it an honest try. Us against the most powerful people in the world. How does that sound?”
Sylvester’s eye moved to Betty’s body, still there.
“Not that good? Can—can you please give me a bit of a response, Sy? Let me know there’s something of you still in there?”
There was uncharacteristic emotion in Jessie’s voice.
“Will you let me come up to you? Can I give you a hug? A kiss? I’ve sort of missed you.”